Key Trends Driving the

Future of Healthcare

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Contents

If today is all about building back better and

getting the ‘digital’ basics right, tomorrow is all
about experience, prediction, personalization
and innovation. Here we take a look at
5 key trends driving the future of healthcare.

1. Enhancing the patient experience 3

2. The central role of data 7
3. Advanced technology 11
4. Sustainability and resilience 15
5. Security and information governance 19
Enhancing the
patient experience
The link between patient experience, clinical effectiveness
and improved outcomes is well established. Positive,
personalized care experiences (and expectations) have a
range of benefits from reducing in-patient stays to
encouraging people to seek treatment earlier. Both of which
have positive impacts on the wider healthcare system.

However, experience is under pressure as patient

expectations grow and apply their personal consumer
experiences to their care. This combined with the entry of
the likes of Amazon, Walmart and others, serves only to
increase expectations from patients – who increasingly
see themselves as consumers.

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 3

Healthcare is responding: adopting a wide range of digital
apps and tools, such as digital front doors, to simplify how
patients engage with their care (and their care providers).
This includes embracing remote patient monitoring,
e-consultation and remote care solutions that boost
convenience, inform and empower patients to manage
their own health and remove unnecessary visits to hospitals
or emergency departments.

Bringing connected devices and virtual consultations

together offers opportunities that go beyond patient
convenience or relieving pressure on the system. Artificial
Intelligence offers new opportunities for clinicians and
clinical researchers to better predict and prevent illness
(without the patient being there).

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 4

At the same time, data-driven workflows within the hospital
setting are removing many time intensive, manual
administrative tasks – reducing stress levels and giving
clinicians back more time to deliver a great care experience.

Moving forward, it is critical to continue to build the digital

infrastructures, services and applications that align,
support and enhance the clinician’s ‘human’ engagement
across the care continuum. Meaning they can meet and
exceed the expectations of an increasingly demanding
patient population. This requires organizations to consider
different business models, enabling new models of care
with technology.

See how Atos is helping

enhance patient experience
across healthcare here

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 5

“ A customer is the most important visitor on our
premises, he is not dependent on us. We are
dependent on him. He is not an interruption in
our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an
outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are
not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing
us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

Mahatma Gandhi
The central role of data
What begins with the Electronic Health Record quickly
extends to leveraging the wealth of health data which is now
available to enable innovations in evidence-based medicine,
population health, precision health and more.

Data is the raw material driving everything. It is now not

uncommon for hospitals to extend their data sets to
include weather, transport, national genomic data as well
as disease and socio-economic trends – and more. All of
which combines to provide a much richer understanding of
population health. Leveraging data can also bring healthcare
and life sciences closer together – to drive translational
research to explore things like breath biopsy as a non-
invasive way to diagnose rare diseases or expand the cohort
of clinical trial study participants as well as available data
through the use of digital biomarkers.

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 7

Making it happen means modernizing environments both in
design and technology, embracing federated learning
platforms and delivering the open and collaborative
environments with supporting business models, capable of
securely sharing data-driven insights and knowledge.

These are not inconsiderable challenges. The profusion of

data sources, IT protocols and file formats create a high
degree of fragmentation. Data sets are often locked up in
inaccessible silos – where finding a single version of the
truth becomes almost impossible. Added to which, as data
volumes rise, so does the need to secure the environment
from end to end. All of this on top of the need to fully revisit
models of care associated with digital care delivery.

Federated learning enables you to pull together

information from multiple decentralized datasets
to build a model.

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 8

Despite integration efforts, issues and concerns over data
ownership and interoperability and third-party systems remain
stumbling blocks for many, and threaten this vision of a data-
enabled future. Putting the foundations and building blocks
in place today is the critical first step to realizing the benefits
of a secure, data-driven healthcare system tomorrow.

See how Atos’ digital infrastructure

services can support a modern
data strategy here

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 9

“ Ten countries are identified as having high
readiness that enables them to develop world-
class health information systems supporting
health system quality, efficiency and
performance and creates a firm foundation for
scientific research and discovery.

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

Advanced technology
Building on data and advanced analytics capabilities,
technology will continue to have a transformative impact
across the healthcare sector. These include machine and
deep learning, natural language processing, artificial
intelligence and much more.

The opportunities really are everywhere: AI-enhanced

chatbots and virtual assistants to improve the patient
experience; the automation of administrative and clinical
workflows to save time and proactively address declining
patient conditions; predictive analytics to optimize resource
and capacity planning as well as predict patient needs,
and more. All of which are reducing cost, enabling more
predictive cost management, supporting greater
management of peaks and troughs in demand and,
crucially, giving clinical teams back more time to care as
well as enabling them to “operate at the top of their license”.

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 11

The ability to handle and cross-pollenate massive amounts
of patient (and patient population) data is leading to faster
and more accurate diagnosis and treatment of rare and/or
complex diseases, genome sequencing, or even simply
providing primary care and preventive care in a more timely
manner, preventing disease advancement and improving
quality of life, and much more.

As a result, there is now unprecedented demand for

advanced solutions that build upon trusted connectivity,
cybersecurity, cloud infrastructures, as well as high
performance and quantum computing power.

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 12

There are considerable challenges to adoption. While the
ever-present budget questions remain, the key issues facing
organizations are typically around the design, planning and
management of these complex apps and systems in new
business/care models. So too, the lack of appropriately
skills resources – both in IT teams and across departments
– creates considerable barriers to success. Training then is
paramount, as is the support from a vendor-neutral partner
with the experience to bring it all together. Lastly, the digital
competency of the patient and their personal support
structure is an important and often forgotten consideration.
Afterall healthcare is about human connections not
technical management.

See how Atos is helping to

re-imagine health in today’s
everything connected world here

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 13

“ We’re certainly handling big data, but what we’re
really after is big information: the ability to
identify the valuable insight from the sequences
in front of us. To do this well, we need good data,
good analytics and good tools.

Ivo Gut, Director

National Center of Genomic Analysis (CNAG)
Access the full story here
Sustainability
and resilience
According to a report from Health Care Without Harm
(HCWH), the healthcare sector accounts for 4.4% of
global greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions each year1.
Sustainability is therefore high on the agenda to showcase
good corporate citizenship and support global
emissions targets.

1 https://noharm-uscanada.org/ClimateFootprintReport

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 15

While this may not be new – the National Health Service
(NHS) in England has been working since 2008 to quantify
and reduce its carbon footprint2 – attitudes have shifted in
recent years. New digital hospital programs offer an
opportunity to bake sustainability and carbon reduction
into the fabric of buildings.

The drive to a more sustainable and lower carbon global

healthcare system is not simply a question of reputation,
social responsibility or indeed energy efficiency and cost
reduction. The environmental risk factors on population
health are well known.

2 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(20)30271-0/fulltext

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 16

The most recent analysis from the United Nations3 shows
24% of global deaths (and 28% of deaths among children
under five) are due to modifiable environmental factors.
These include respiratory infections from air pollution and
diarrhoeal diseases from dirty water. Similarly, a wide range
of mental, behavioural and neurological disorders resulting
from climate related extreme weather events and disasters
all have very real health impacts.

Reducing healthcare’s own impact on the changing climate

through carbon reduction and net-zero initiatives will benefit
wider society.

Click here to see how Atos is

helping healthcare organizations
decarbonize business processes
and reduce their digital footprints
with green technologies.

3 https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565196

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 17

“ Climate change represents an inevitable, massive
threat to global health that will likely eclipse the
major known pandemics as the leading cause of
death and disease in the 21st century... The health
of the world population must be elevated in this
discussion from an afterthought to a central
theme around which decision-makers construct
rational, well informed action-orientated climate
change strategies.

Dr. Dana Hanson

President, World Medical Association
Security and
information governance
While the rapid digitalization of the sector is driving major
advancements in patient care, it is also opening up new
attack vectors. Telemedicine, remote monitoring, virtual
care and remote work are introducing new vulnerabilities
into the healthcare ecosystem. Healthcare providers
increasingly rely on cloud, mobile healthcare apps, point-of-
care platforms, and connected medical devices. Often not
inherently secure, these technologies process patient
valuable and sensitive data. It makes them potential entry
points sophisticated cybercriminal gangs and well-funded
state-sponsored attackers are looking to exploit.

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 19

Sometimes the intention is to ransom or steal, other times to
disrupt. Whatever the reason, attacks are coming thick and
fast. Over a six-day period in August 2021, for example,
cyber attackers stole personal data from over half a
million patients from a Texas healthcare provider4. In the
same month an Atlanta-based allergy clinic notified nearly
10,000 patients of a ransomware attack5 that saw protected
information stolen and uploaded to the dark web.

This pattern of attacks and breaches is reflected globally,

with impacts ranging from regulatory action and
corresponding reputational damage to very real health
effects on patients. In 2020, the Hospital of Düsseldorf in
Germany was the first institution to record a cyberattack
may have contributed to a patient death.6

4 https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/healthcare-provider-texas-ent-alerts-535-000-patients-to-
data-breach
5 https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/breach-at-deep-south-allergy-clinic-group-exposed-the-
health-info-of-estimated-9-800-patients
6 https://thehackernews.com/2020/09/a-patient-dies-after-ransomware-attack.html

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 20

It is clear therefore that cybersecurity solutions must keep
pace with the healthcare providers and payers’ innovation so
they can operate with complete trust. Healthcare sensitive
data must be protected more than ever, but still be easily
accessible for the right teams, allowing them to better focus
on patient care.

A holistic ‘zero trust’ model must be adopted for access and

security management – based on the principle of “never trust,
always verify”. Any user and device, such as connected vital
sensors or IoT, that tries to connect to the organization directly
or indirectly will be verified before being granted access.

This will ensure organizations have complete visibility over

their systems and that only trusted devices and users will be
able to access the hospital’s resources and patient data.

This way, professional carers and patients can fully trust that
their data is safe and in the right hands.

Find out more about how Atos can

protect operational efficiency, data
and patients here

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 21

“ Simply put, a connected medical device that is not secure
can be a risk, not only to data privacy, but also for patient’s
lives. Hackers will increasingly discover and exploit the
vulnerabilities of medical devices. Adopting Zero Trust
concepts and ideas to the design and manufacturing of
these devices will help mitigate those risks and limit their
impact. The same should apply, obviously, to their integration
within healthcare facilities, in terms of security policies at
both architectural and technical levels, including verification
of the identity of every asset.

Vasco Gomes,
Global CTO for cybersecurity products, distinguished expert
and member of the Scientific Community, Atos
Further reading
Evolution and Innovation: The Digital Future of Healthcare.

This document provides a snapshot of the truly exciting

opportunities available to healthcare providers and payers as
they transform to enhance service delivery in the digital world.
To find out more, read our comprehensive report Evolution
and Innovation: The Digital Future of Healthcare.

Bringing together the latest thinking from across global

healthcare systems, the personal perspectives of healthcare
executives and our own vision of the future, this report aims
to inform digital strategies around the world.

Evolution and Innovation:

The Digital Future of
Healthcare

Get the report for free at here

Key Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare 23

About Atos
Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 107,000 employees and
annual revenue of over € 11 billion. European number one in cybersecurity, cloud
and high performance computing, the Group provides tailored end-to-end
solutions for all industries in 71 countries. A pioneer in decarbonization services
and products, Atos is committed to a secure and decarbonized digital for its
clients. Atos is a SE (Societas Europaea), listed on Euronext Paris and included in
the CAC 40 ESG and Next 20 Paris Stock indexes.

The purpose of Atos is to help design the future of the information space.
Its expertise and services support the development of knowledge, education and
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develop sustainably, in a safe and secure information space.

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